2004 Emily Lloyd, The Most Daring of TransplantsArgonne House Press, Washington, DC

2003 James Keegan Of Fathers and SonsArgonne House Press, Washington, DC

SUBMISSION PERIOD FOR THE

SEVENTEENTH ANNUAL DOGFISH HEAD POETRY PRIZE OPENS MAY 15, 2019!

Submission Guidelines

The seventeenth annual Dogfish Head Poetry Prize for the winning book-length manuscript by a poet residing in the Mid-Atlantic states (DE, MD, VA, PA, NJ, NY, WVA, NC and District of Columbia) will consist of $500, two cases of Dogfish Head Craft Brewed Beer*, manuscript publication by Broadkill River Press, and 10 copies of the book (in lieu of royalties).

The rules are: Manuscripts must be received by midnight, August 15, 2019. Manuscripts received after the closing date will not be considered. Eligible poets must reside in the above listed states and be twenty-one years of age by the date of the award. * The manuscript is to be submitted electronically in one MS Word document attachment. Send to Prize coordinator Linda Blaskey at dogfishheadpoetryprize@earthlink.net. Snail mail submissions will not be accepted.

Two title pages are to be included with each submission: the first with the title of the manuscript, author’s name, address, phone numbers and e-mail address; the second with just the manuscript title. No manuscript is to have any author-identifying information other than the one title page and will be rejected if it does. Judging is blind and double-tiered. The manuscript must be book-length (between 48 and 78 pages of original work – no translations) and no more than roughly thirty lines to a page, including the poem’s title and two line-spaces between the title and the body of the poem. A poem may be more than one page. One submission per entrant. There is no entry fee.

This year’s final judge will be Joseph Millar.

The award will be presented to the winner on Saturday evening, December 14, 2019 at the Dogfish Inn in Lewes, Delaware. The winner must agree to attend this event and to read from their winning book at a reception honoring the winner. The prize will be officially awarded by Sam Calagione, Founder and CEO of Dogfish Head Craft Brewery and Distillery, or by another company official.

The author of the winning manuscript also agrees to provide, within ten days of notification, a color head-shot photograph, with photographer’s credit, for the back cover and a dedication page for the interior of the book. Also, an acknowledgement page of poems previously published, and in which publications and/or websites they appeared will need to be provided. The winner agrees to travel to Delaware at the winner’s expense for awarding of the prize. Dogfish Head will provide the winner two nights lodging at the Dogfish Inn in the beach resort town of Lewes, Delaware.

Dogfish Head Craft Brewed Ales retains the right to use any of the winning work in promotional materials.

Co-workers of Dogfish Head and their families are ineligible to enter. Previous winners of the prize are ineligible to enter.

For questions and more information contact Linda Blaskey, Prize coordinator, at linblask@aol.com

$18.95

Indelible

Becky Could Gibson

Winner of the 2018 Dogfish Head Poetry Prize

Becky Gould Gibson, of Winston-Salem, North Carolina, has been selected as the winner of the 2018 Dogfish Head Poetry
Prize for her manuscript, “Indelible.” The Prize was presented on December 8 at the Dogfish Inn, in Lewes, DE, by Andrew Greeley, innkeeper. The annual Prize consists of publication of her manuscript by the Broadkill River Press, 10 copies of the published book, $500 in prize money, two cases of Dogfish Head beer, and two nights’ stay at the Dogfish Inn.

Indelible is a testament in verse that concerns ‘Lydia’ of Philippi, the dealer in purple cloth mentioned in the Book of Acts, said to be the first convert to Christianity in Europe. Gibson brings to life ‘Lydia’s’ charged relationship with the Apostle Paul and her struggle to sustain religious faith over two millennia. No stranger to the Pauline texts (and later works) which inform the poems, Gibson brings her scholarly eye to bear on the humanity of Lydia and those other early converts, situating them firmly in their historical time and place.

Becky Gould Gibson, Ph.D. (UNC-Chapel Hill, 1977), taught English and Women’s Studies at Guilford College until her retirement in 2008. Her poems have appeared in journals and anthologies, to include Kalliope, Feminist Studies, The Comstock Review, The Chattahoochee Review, Tampa Review, Poetry South, and The Southern Poetry Anthology: Volume VII (Texas Review Press, 2014). Gibson has published seven poetry collections, notably, Aphrodite’s Daughter (2006 X. J. Kennedy Prize, Texas Review Press, 2007); Need-Fire (2005 Poetry Book Contest, Bright Hill Press, 2007); and The Xanthippe Fragments (St.Andrews University Press, 2016). The last two books give voice to women whose words are missing from the historical record: Hild, Abbess of Whitby (615-680), and Socrates’ wife Xanthippe. Indelible is a third poetic sequence in that vein. Becky lives with her husband and their canary in Winston-Salem, NC.

The Dogfish Head Poetry Prize is in its 16th year and was created by CEO of Dogfish Head Sam Calagione (a literature major in college), and is open to residents of North Carolina, Virginia, West Virginia, Maryland, Delaware, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, New York, and District of Columbia. Publication of the winning manuscript is supported in part by The Cape Gazette. Readers who wish to acquire a copy of Indelible can purchase the book online at www.broadkillriverpress.com

$17.95

Blue Honey

Beth Copeland

Winner of the 2017 Dogfish Head Poetry Prize

“The Blue Honeythatflows through Copeland’s collection by that name, through her parents’ flurry of furious wings–that flows through Japan, her siblings, an Alaskan airport, and The South, where a childhood was held by the ankles upside down and slapped–that flows through a marriage, torn and mended, flows through it all with a fearless and loving spirit, with personality, humor, anger, and craft. Reader, I dare you to walk away from this elegy unmoved.”

Roger Weingarten, author of Ethan Benjamin Boldt (Knopf), Ghost-wrestling (Godine), and The Four Gentlemen and Their Footmen (Longleaf, 2015).

“Beth Copeland’s Blue Honey is a lyrical case study of loss and the ways in which it reverberates through a family’s center. . . Copeland is a master storyteller; she weaves each of these narratives seamlessly through the text, and her ear for language—not to mention her eye for the most delicate of details—is a veritable honey trap for the reader.”

“The structure of Blue Honey . . . reenacts the circular journey that so many of us must make, from being cared for by our parents to ushering them through the mysterious borderland known as old age. Beth Copeland (writes) with breathtaking honesty . . . metaphorically fresh and formally inventive . . . Bravo to Copeland for not shying away from poetry’s most arduous and important task, which is to write about life in a way that makes us feel less alone.”

Sue Ellen Thompson, editor The Autumn House Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry, and recipient of the 2010 Maryland Author Award

About Beth Copeland

The child of missionaries, Beth Copeland was born in Japan, where she spent her early childhood, as well as in India and the United States. Her first full-length poetry book Traveling through Glass received the 1999 Bright Hill Press Poetry Book Award. Her second book Transcendental Telemarketer was published by BlazeVOX in 2012. Her poems have appeared in literary journals and anthologies, including Aeolian Harp, Atlanta Review, New Millennium Writings, The North American Review, Pedestal Magazine, Pirene’s Fountain, Poet’s Market, Rattle, The Southern Poetry Anthology, and Tar River Poetry and have been featured on the CBS NewsHour website. Beth received her MFA degree from Bowling Green State University in Ohio and teaches creative writing at her undergraduate alma mater, St. Andrews University. She lives with her husband Phil Rech and hound dog Kasey in a log cabin in North Carolina.

$10.95

FLUX Quanta

James Michael Robbins

James Michael Robbins, noted Austin poet and former Publisher of The Sulphur River Literary Review, has authored a new collection of work, FLUX Quanta (Broadkill Press, $10.95).

Richard Peabody, Publisher of Gargoyle Magazine, says “Robbins is a poet at play in the fields of economics and science,” and that these poems are “shot through the Large Hadron Collider into Bartleby’s wall…(Robbins) is not the first to intertwine language and science via exploratory poems, but he sure has a good time.”

Peabody’s assessment will not surprise anyone familiar with Robbins’ prior work, which melded his academic interest in Physics (BS in Physics, East Texas State) with his poetry. His previous chapbook of poems, Graviture, was published by Rancho Loco Press in 2001.

Lyn Lifshin notes that “Lostness and the unreal collide with creativity in a world where things keep disappearing. The poems move between mystery and enigma. Opposites flourish, action and inaction.”

Poet a. mclean appreciates how Robbins’ poems seem coaxed from “the intersection of the frontiers of physics and poetry,” suggesting that they reflect “what…NASA, the wild west, and Stephen Hawking have in common.”

$16.95

FLICKER

Mary B.Moore

WINNER- 2016 DOGFISH HEAD POETRY PRIZE

“Flicker is the work of a poet’s poet, someone who captures the lyric moment with precision and careful prosody, and who loves language. as much for its malleability as for its sensuality. These are poems that celebrate the sound of every word and the feel in the mouth when we say them. In these poems, M. B. Moore remakes the natural world in ‘orderly/coats of gloss and reverie,’ reminding us that our most ardent prayer is founded in paying attention.”

Gerry LaFemina, author of Vanishing Horizon and Little Heretic

“The poetry of Mary Moore, with its lush vocabulary and soaring music, its historical intelligence and emotional risk, repeatedly — relentlessly, in fact — wakens readers to the power of verse to vivify the commonplace, quash the pompous, and locate the ‘liquored vagaries’ as well as the ‘rifts brief cleavings and aversions’ of our world. Flicker is a book that shimmers with invention, insight, and the ‘jumpy translucence of flame.'”

“In Flicker, M. B. Moore considers ‘what holds us together.’ In doing so, she looks closely and unflinchingly at this world, its buzzing and its beauty. These are poems full of color and light, startling imagery, and keen observation. Flicker is a finely wrought book from a poet who deserves attention.”

Joseph Mills, author of Exit, Pursued by a Bear and The Miraculous Turning

$16.95

ROCK TAUGHT

David McAleavey

OUR NOMINEE FOR THE 2016 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD!

It’s hard to describe the pleasure that comes from reading David McAleavey’s poetry, that wonderful, unstable union of the cerebral with the corporeal, the frisson present in every line. He says, “Yogis call it ‘Breath of Fire’: the spinal,/painful thrill bashing into brain/from tailbone, winging back down/and up again.” The poems follow the breath of fire that is consciousness itself. In Rock Taught, we wander through the poet’s life, follow him on his “daily route” to work, or into an abandoned house, or on his visits to a museum in Germany or a strip club in Harlem.

Always restless, he discovers in his poems a place within himself, where, as he says, “something shifts and shunts me / into the predicament of not knowing / how to praise, how to exclaim, / and a way appears.” His way is to confront the ordinary and let it prompt in him the unexpected exclamations that are these poems with their gift for feeling fully the inexplicable world around him. They breathe dark fire.

Dana Roeser

$10.95

MATCHSTICK & BRAMBLE

Lucy Simpson

It is a rare occurrence to find a poet of a high professional standard on an internet poetry forum; rarer still to share a literary journey with one such for over a decade. Lucy has a skillful command of her inner world and often employs classical mythological archetypes to paint that world in new and personal hues. Her insights and lyricism attract the reader on every level. She is quite simply, a major, and magical poet.

Eric Ashford-Poet

Lucy Simpson has written a spellbinding collection of poetry, reminiscent of Anne Sexton’s Transformations; language brutal and poignant, reframing myths, legends and fairy tales with fearsome attention to detail. Many of the poems read like incantations, a reversal of curses, chock full of blood and gore and prescient beasts. Magic steps out from the crannies in the guise of angels, orphans and donkey daughters in this collection of poetry. I was totally bewitched.

Tori Grant Welhouse, Poet

Lucy Simpson’s poems are full of windows, and she takes her readers through these windows into worlds where a woodworker’s daughter plays a fiddle made from a branch of Eve’s tree and witches drink pennyroyal for whisky. Simpson’s poems retell and reinvent the tales we remember or half-remember, blending mythology, biblical heroes and demons, the Brothers Grimm and girls falling like brides in the Triangle Factory fire. Her poems transport us and guide us–both a heady bottle of “Drink me” and a map in a bottle. She leads us into and out of the dark woods, and to follow her Riding Hood still bloody in exodus from the wolf’s belly is to know the word wonderful. Kelly Riggle Hower – Seattle Public Schools Teacher – Poet – Winner of the Richard Hugo House Poetry of Place

$16.95

CONTENTS UNDER PRESSURE

A COLLECTION OF SHORT FICTION

Ellen Prentiss Campbell

THE BROADKILL RIVER PRESS NOMINEE FOR THE 2015 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD IN FICTION!

Contents Under Pressure is a beautiful story collection by a writer whose wisdom and compassion illuminate every page. Ellen Prentiss Campbell understands how her vividly drawn characters can love and hurt each other simultaneously, and she probes into the recesses of their hearts. Altogether a pleasure to read.

Lynne Sharon Schwartz

Ellen Prentiss Campbell’s Contents Under Pressure is an aptly named book, indeed. These stories crackle with tension, delivered in language with the concision and precision of poetry. Never predictable, always insightful, and often breathtakingly acute, Campbell is a writer to watch.

Rose Solari, author of The Last Girl and A Secret Woman

The strange and the unexpected play powerful roles in Ellen Prentiss Campbell’s haunting stories of transformation. The characters’ dilemmas—a foundering marriage, a child’s death, a father’s madness—are not so much resolved at the story’s end as they are given surprising new forms. In one, an amazing tour de force, a young woman drawn to the underwater world is transformed into a mermaid. Campbell’s precise, elegant prose renders her gift for the uncanny both believable and a wonderful read.

Kate Blackwell, author of You Won’t Remember This: Stories

$16.95

ORPHEUS, TURNING

Faith Shearin

2015 Dogfish Head Poetry Prize Winner!

Faith Shearin’s elegant skitterings manage to be at the same time well-crafted and spontaneous, unself-conscious and acute, so that the reader is drawn to her lively spirit. I can’t think of anyone else who would write “The past demands /that you wear a hat, that you /eat your dead aunt’s casserole” and achieve our delight in her surprising truth.

David R. Slavitt

If Orpheus, Turning doesn’t make you ache with the love of poetry, please have your vital signs checked as soon as possible. Faith Shearin creates a reality of light and shadow, sweet textures of a sentient past, with respect for its impermanence and a vow to make it last. ‘Just beyond the ghost of the dog of childhood’ she writes. We believe in the passage of her time, and beneath its skin are set pieces of effortless beauty. She says, ‘The past wants you back,’ and I say, yes, we want to go there.

Grace Cavalieri

In Faith Shearin’s fifth collection, Orpheus,Turning, the sixty-one free-verse lyrics are often drawn from the dynamics of an American family. They convey both hope and sorrow in moving ways, and in language that delights when it offers jolts like this possum, “his face a triangle/ of albino dislike.” The power of memory sometimes over-rules the ravages of time, too, when remembered details flesh out events. Ms. Shearin can also stand reality on its head, as when some passengers on the Titanic, still down there in the ship’s hull, carry on as though no disaster occurred, or when the family dog educates itself by watching TV. Add to this some historical characters like Marie Curie and Amelia Earhart, some figures like Orpheus and Eurydice and the Pied Piper of Hamelin, and Orpheus, Turning is a heart-made view of how we live.

Brendan Galvin

Faith Shearin gives us a study of turning points, instants where the world of the interior begins to swing back on a hinge of understanding or wonder. As we enter in that stillness, “listening to our low horn ask its one question,” we share in Orpheus’s eagerness and his rue. A stirring and scissors-sharp collection.

Jeremy Penna

$16.95

NOISE

W.M. Rivera

William Rivera is a master poet. He speaks of “imagination made flesh” in his stunning new book. Imagination also makes thought forms beautifully shaped and crafted with surprises coming in the side doors. Rivera writes of poetry, science, history, nature, art, travel, mythology, with knowledge and achievement; but being learned is not what wins the day in any poem — it is Rivera’s freedom of heart and generosity of feeling that expand the context. Of all the books you’ll leaf through, sitting on your desk waiting, this is the one you’ll rather read. I promise.

Grace Cavalieri “The Poet and the Poem from The Library of Congress”

With a romantic’s ear for lyricism, Rivera’s poems explore our highs and lows, our lust for beauty and the folly of love. Driving to work, or checking out at the supermarket, lines in Noise keep coming back to you.

Scott Whitaker, Author, Book Review Editor for The Broadkill Review, and Member, NBCC

$9.95

SILENCE, INTERRUPTED

Jim Bourey

Named Best Book of Verse 2015 Delaware Press Association

Silence often marks the absence of life, or it’s pause, but in Bourey’s poems of family, rural life, and work the world, is anything but silent, or paused. Bourey searches the darkness lurking at the edge of small towns, and searches the natural world around him to discover wise teachers in the birds, a fishing trip, and the veterans drinking at the bar. Bourey is after the truth, which is never silent.

Scott Whitaker, author of The Black Narrows

Jim Bourey’s Silence, Interrupted is a superb collection of poems that raise a cry/bringing others in/ to savor the wintry meal. His poems resound with passion, compassion, inventiveness, and intelligence. Jim reminds the reader, when spring’s melting/arrived there was less silence. / Noise was welcomed. These poems deliver noise. Jim teases the reader, wants tohear/your poet’s voice as if we’re in/ the same room, drinking together with urgency. These poems do not reminisce or drift in sentimental tides. These poems listen to neighbors talking loudly at two-thirty in the morning. But do not be misled, these poems are not white noise – these poems break silence.

Michael Blaine, author of Brackish Water

“Silence, Interruptedembraces the beauty and necessity of noise in our lives. In poems that take us from Vietnam to abandoned coal mines and the ocean boardwalk, Jim Bourey’s meditative and often ironic eye never flinches from the poet’s task of questioning and telling the truth, “no matter how it all plays out.” Fiercely attentive to the poetic line, he allows us to linger in the music of each moment as he explores themes of loss, guilt, and family legacy. Bourey’s words are like “sparks generating fire”; his poems remind us to pay attention to our internal and external worlds, those noises both “silent and alive.”

Amanda Newell, author of Fractured Light

$15.95

THE TABLE OF THE ELEMENTS

J. T. Whitehead

BROADKILL RIVER PRESS NOMINEE FOR THE2015NATIONAL BOOK AWARD IN POETRY!

NAMED WINNER OF THE 2015 Margaret Randall Poetry Prize, sponsored by The Mas Tequila Review

“Whether being lighthearted as a helium balloon or serious as a hydrogen bomb, J. T. Whitehead seeks what is true and elemental about our lives. The spirit of Kurt Vonnegut lives on in this poetic romp through the periodic table by the editor of So It Goes: The Literary Journal of the Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library.”

Julie Kane

“Thank you so much for The Table of the Elements, which I’m enjoying more than any poetry I’ve seen in a long time. (I’m on my second reading now.) It’s original, unselfconscious, deep, often very witty. It’s also sensuous and erudite. If it isn’t nice, I don’t know what is. . . .There are poems in here that touch on things that have always been important to me, and some that jog my long, old memory in some ways I can’t pin down yet. . . . I’m impressed and entertained.”

James Alexander Thom

“J.T. Whitehead’s Table of the Elements is alchemy, boldly discovering and rediscovering the natural world. These poems recast the periodic table of elements, and raw natural resources such as salt and oil through the poetic eye. Whitehead reminds us that nothing is ever as it appears, that mankind may be gifted at naming elements, and wielding natural resources, but their stories, their histories, and their mythologies, personal and universal, transmute us all.”

Scott Whitaker Book Review Editor, The Broadkill Review, and Member, National Book Critics Circle

“J. T. Whitehead brings to this monumental collection all the gifts we would expect of any poet worth his sodium: Music, Imagery, Form (traditional and free), Sensitivity, Passion, Humanity, The World, The Self. What he adds to those . . . what is lacking in so much of the mediocre volumes heaped upon us today . . . is INTELLIGENCE! A World Class Intelligence. That which envelops experience, orders and reorders it, penetrates and invades it, not eschewing syllogistic reasoning or immersion in the knowledge and wisdom of the great geniuses of the past, and the application of this great inquiry to the particularities of his life and ours. What poets of permanent interest have possessed intelligence of such dimensions? Eliot springs to mind. John Donne. Yeats. Blake. Dante. Joyce (in his great poem, Finnegans Wake). Shakespeare. Rilke. Whitman. Horace. Pope. Homer. There are others, but you get the idea. We are talking about Poets of DIMENSION.

“Do not be scared off by this. All those I have mentioned have ultimately demonstrated the greatest clarity of vision and expression. J.T. brings to language the quintessential precision and clarity of the Legal Mind, enriched by the Poetic Imagination: a Bicameral Creativity. Accept the challenge. Prove yourself the equal of it. “Buy the Fucking Book!”

Gerald Locklin

“J.T. Whitehead’s The Table of the Elements gives us proof that poetry is found in all things, and we are engulfed in it. His poetic vision takes our arrogant assumption of the inanimate world, and turns it on its head. This collection of poems declares to the reader: you and I do not master the elements, the elements master us. In a time when it becomes clear that mankind has done nothing to deserve a planet so full of wonder and grace, these poems remind us that we are nothing but the stuff we, ourselves, take for granted and waste. Here, poetry documents the folly and mayhem of our physical journey. While we squander our lives, Whitehead reminds us that the solids, gases, molecules and atoms of the universe patiently await our unavoidable return.”

$16.95

GOOD WITH ORANGES

Sid Gold

Sid Gold is a quintessential American poet. Unlike many of his contemporaries he is a pioneer, a conqueror, who keeps expanding his artistic universe. Read this book, read again his previous poetry collections and you will agree: Sid Gold is a master!

Lyubomir Nikolov, Author of Unreal Estate

Sid Gold’s poems are both streetwise and deeply compassionate. Going against the grain of our wish-fulfillment culture, they look to the unlovely and dilapidate; many of the characters we meet in them have survived setbacks, while some are on a collision course with reality. These are poems about coming to terms, and about finding—as we cast off ego and delusion—what will suffice: “the crisp leaves/of November stirring in the wind/the knife blade slicing through the day-old loaf.” Gold’s generosity of spirit recalls Whitman, William Carlos Williams and Gerald Stern; at the same time, the artistry and seductive elegance of his poems distinguishes him from most chroniclers of contemporary urban life. He is, as the book’s title suggests, “good with oranges.”

Robert Herschbach, Author of Loose Weather

Sid Gold’s Good with Oranges offers us an unflinching view of the world. The voice in these poems is as clear and direct as the truths they lay bare—truths spanning from our deepest individual desires to the public narrative of our shared human history. Often the two are present in a single moment, juxtaposed in such surprising ways that we are forced to reexamine what we thought we knew…and find ourselves changed in the process.

Holly Karapetkova, Author of Words We Might One Day Say

“J.T. Whitehead’s The Table of the Elements gives us proof that poetry is found in all things, and we are engulfed in it. His poetic vision takes our arrogant assumption of the inanimate world, and turns it on its head. This collection of poems declares to the reader: you and I do not master the elements, the elements master us. In a time when it becomes clear that mankind has done nothing to deserve a planet so full of wonder and grace, these poems remind us that we are nothing but the stuff we, ourselves, take for granted and waste. Here, poetry documents the folly and mayhem of our physical journey. While we squander our lives, Whitehead reminds us that the solids, gases, molecules and atoms of the universe patiently await our unavoidable return.”

$9.95

THE STORIES WE TELL

Irene Fick

Best Book of Poetry 2014!National Federation of Press Women

Best Book of Verse 2014! Delaware Press Association

Irene Fick’s first book has stolen my heart with its clear sweet lines, and lack of artifice. Here’s poetry that doesn’t need to persuade, for its presence in the world emerges from a genuine source with immediate connectivity. The title of the book is straightforward, yet it’s rare to create the right story in the right form with themes laid out in a unified vision. Fick is a writer of observation, but more, of felt life. Once you enter her currents of thought, there’s no going back or stopping. To be able to show hard glimpses of reality with beauty and truth is a gift many poets have not achieved. As for fear, age, dementia, illness and death, Fick turns them over to the angels of language where they belong—and they could not do better. I am permanently touched by this book.

Grace Cavalieri, Producer/Host, “The Poet and the Poem from the Library of Congress”

Fick focuses her journalist’s eyes on her childhood (in an imperfect Italian family in Brooklyn) and her adulthood as though she wanted to be sentimental, but instead nails down her observations with sharply delineated details. Entering the domain of poetry, she combines words in novel combinations, often juxtaposing one truth against another with fresh vision, originality, and regard for the innate music of good free verse. One sees ever the sense of discovery, uncovering truths without need for fancy phrases, pretty devices or four-letter words, because, poem after poem, the perceptions and combinations are right on target.

Elisavietta Ritchie, Author of Tiger Upstairs on Connecticut Avenue

$15.95

PEREGRINE NATION

Lucian Mattison

WINNER- 2014 DOGFISH HEAD POETRY PRIZE

Lucian Mattison writes poems that travel across continents and griefs, bi-cultural, speaking between languages, his is a broad geography from pool halls to the dim lights of Argentina, he brings us through the alleyways of lost loves and the bar tables where we count our losses, but always with some sense of hope, some far away music calling us as when he urges “hear my voice inhabit/a familiar melody, as if/ I’ve lived my entire life somewhere else/ in a second tongue.”

Sean Thomas Dougherty

In semi-documentary dramatic scenes, Lucian Mattison tells stories about a specific locale, a Peregrine Nation that I can think my way into, or sink into–an outlier’s view of Argentina. His scenes remain in the mind because each line of poetry, as Ezra Pound recommended, is written “at least as well as prose.” Mattison’s poetry masquerading as prose is generally straightforward but delivers sudden fillips that transpose the reader to another level. He is a scrupulous poet who will engage readers with his bright, spontaneous, clear, never-strained, uncluttered , new voice.

Larry Woiwode

Lucian Mattison stamps our passports and welcomes us to the Peregrine Nation, a region in history both personal and shared. Although the poems take us all over Chile and Argentina, we never feel welcome in either. Rather the Peregrine Nation seems to be a kind of Nowhere Land for those “not completely gringo or Argentinian.” By oscillating between poetic strategies, between shorter lyrics and more narrative poem, Mattison formally enacts this juxtaposition, creating a poetry that all outsiders will find welcoming.

Gerry LaFemina

$15.95

ON GANNON STREET

Mary Ann Larkin

Exquisitely made, lyrical, yet unpretentious, Mary Ann Larkin’s On Gannon Street evokes the complexities of a black neighborhood and its relationship with a sole white resident, with all the poignance of a novel, but with a gifted poet’s miraculous economy. We know these characters, their dreams, frustrations, acts of ordinary kindness, in all four dimensions, but above it all there’s a visionary fifth dimension hovering, showing a wisdom and imagination of the highest order, making Gannon Street a place not to be missed in anyone’s tour of America.

Alan Feldman, Author of Immortality

$15.95

POSTCARD FROM BOLOGNA

Howard Gofreed

Nominated for the 2014 National Book Critics Circle Award!

Howard Gofreed’s Postcard from Bologna contains personal poems with both violence and ache at their center. Gofreed looks war, loneliness, and age in the face and dares to keep on going. There’s courage in these poems, and humor too, and Gofreed doesn’t back down from a fight. “There will always be hostages,” he writes about Iran and his own health, and he’s right; sometimes the hostages of our horrible acts are our loved ones, and our own damaged hearts.

Scott Whitaker, Author of The Black Narrows

Howard Gofreed’s voice is egalitarian and inviting, each poem an invitation to overhear a man reflect on his experiences – war, children divorce, lustings, the past, the everyday comings and goings – in a tone that is often wryly comic and sceptical but always empathic.

Merrill Leffler, Author of Mark the Music

$16.00

LEMON LIGHT

H.A. Maxson

H.A. Maxson’s Lemon Light is a resounding addition to an already fine body of work. There is many-angled and moving clarity here, a plain-spokenness shot through with illuminating nuance. Any one of these poems can have the reader saying, “Yes, this is it exactly.”

Thomas Reiter Author of Catchment: Poems

Clear, lively, and often stunning in their language, the poems in H.A. Maxson’s LEMON LIGHT surprise us with images like this: “I have held the ankles of the voracious upside-down man as he chewed through rock and root for the last time.” That’s a brand new look at a post-hole digger, and whether the subject is muskrats, King Croesus, or Assateague ponies, Maxson’s particulars are exact and gratifying. He is that rare poet who lifts the world out of the commonplace for the reader’s astonishment.

Brendan Galvin Author of Ocean Effects: Poems

$10.95

CHARMED LIFE

Buck Downs

I don’t know if Buck Downs leads a charmed life—literally—but there’s something exceedingly lucky—felicitous—happy—about the way he lays down these poetic telegrams of twenty-first-century experience in Charmed Life. The reader swoops along on Downs’s burst of coy and cunning language, “drifting like old- / fashioned / radio signals” through the perennial—but here freshly revivified—territories of love, sex, music, everyday living. These poems will charm your socks—hell, maybe even your pants—off: “don’t change / your mind / for me, // not if / you grind / for me.”

Mark Scroggins. Author of Red Arcadia

$10.95

BRACKISH WATER

Michael Blaine

In “Brackish Water” Michael Blaine’s haiku often startle with a surprising jolt in line three. His ekphrastic poems peer beneath the paint deep into the underlying metaphor. Whether he is celebrating being a father, a husband or a teacher, his images are hard and clear and they make his old, old subjects sparkle in new light.

I like the voice of the teacher evident in this collection, a teacher aware he is walking with his children (and his readers) to points of growth which are also points of no return, moments when familiar realities feel fundamental and life-sustaining, though they also seem to usher each of us off into our own privacies. Often it’s the haiku in this collection that present these moments most magically; for instance, “Cicada shell/I find her college photos/in the trash can.” Or, “just noticing/the countless scratches –/wedding band.” Or, “only brown moths/around the last zinnia blooms/our breath visible.”

David McAleavey, Author of Holding Obsidian

In Brackish Water, Michael Blaine navigates the complicated habitats of desire, marriage, fatherhood, and loss. He reminds us that “[r]eal isn’t enough”—that something more must be “added to make/the eye believe.” Blaine’s poems, in effect, become a kind of tide themselves, carrying the reader from Rehoboth Bay to as far away as the Gulf of Mexico and Haiti. And yet, the spare imagery of these finely crafted poems—the silky muck, the tractor discs, the rock and shale—keeps us firmly rooted in the earth. Blaine’s remarkable collection affirms our shared consciousness, and in the end, he shows us it is possible to sift among the wreckage, “to pick up and rebuild/what [is] salvageable.”

Amanda Newell, Author of Fractured Light

$9.95

LOVE, WAR, & MUSIC

Franetta McMillian

Franetta McMillian’s poems are deliciously awash in the (often overlooked) inherent musicality found in the word, and in an infectious, riveting, and unabashedly singular vision. You cannot help but follow these rhythmic narrative journeys. You want to know where the poems are going — what you will see, hear, and feel on the way. You’ll also want to revisit each poem’s questions and/or implications. I often found myself thinking of a line from another poet—Rainer Maria Rilke— “Love the questions like locked doors.”Ms. Mc Millan’s work is a reminder that there are still infinite linguistic songs to be sung—what Patti Smith dubbed “a sea of possibilities.” Let this fine volume into your heart.

Reuben Jackson, Author, fingering the keys and Host of “Friday Night Jazz” Vermont Public Radio

Franetta McMillian writes in a language both clear and meditative, tackling subject matter as wide ranging as the title of her work suggests. She evokes the imagery of everything from popular television shows to vehement bigotry, and each time provokes the readers to challenge their perceptions on the matter. This poetry is not preaching, nor is it pushing boundaries for the sake of it—McMillian engages in a deep exploration of her various subjects with each line, and that sort of depth can’t do anything but force the audience to think in a new way.

$9.95

HIGHWAY 78

Susanne Bostick

Long-time government writer Susanne Bostick Allen advises that “[r]ed is vital to our mission” and “[b]eige has practical applications”, but “the sentences are up to no good”. She chastens bureaucracy with understated humor, then escapes to clear-eyed remembrance of childhood visits to relatives in rural Alabama.Highway 78 cogently contrasts both ways of life to reveal a life well examined and honestly reported.

Howard Gofreed, author ofPostcard from Bologna

From the rich bottom land of Alabama to the slick highways circumventing Washington D.C. , Susanne Bostick Allen takes us on a sojourn of unsentimental power with her skillfully balanced poetry. The subtext is a woman’s identity, probing into corners with intelligent humor. Allen’s calm observations become poetry as the rhythm of language governs narrative, and we then enter an extended map of a poet’s fine senses.

Grace Cavalieri, Producer/Host “The Poet and the Poem from the Library of Congress.”

$16.00

DUTIFUL HEART

Joy Gaines-Friedler

A beautiful collection of clear, grounded, surprising and moving poems about creating friendships and letting go loved ones, taking in whatever good there is to be had, and cutting out the damaged parts, and letting them go. Never over-poetic, simply graceful, smart, and necessary.

Heather Sellers, Author of Georgia Under Water

So fine to have Ms. Gaines-Friedler’s poems in the world — recording as they do with grace and proper gravitas the shift between generations, seasons, those watershed moments that move one day irretrievably into another.

Thomas Lynch, Author of Walking Papers

Like the bird that ‘curves its tiny bones around the twigs of wobbly branches,’ these poems adapt to and ride the most fierce and fragile of circumstances. Whether from the nursing home or the broken relationship — and with humor and forgiveness — the poems in Dutiful Heart bloom where they are planted. Joy Gaines-Friedler’s tender work reminds us to stay tethered, to keep refilling the feeder and always bring ‘something sweet for the table.’

Terry Blackhawk, Author of The Dropped Hand

$16.95

SPEED ENFORCED BY AIRCRAFT

Richard Peabody

Pulitzer Prize Nominee

Peabody’s latest collection of poetry is a testament to the many facets of his career. Though Peabody is a writer, poet, publisher, editor and long-time literary maven who has dedicated a large part of his own life to promoting other writers, especially young and/or emerging writers, this one-time wunderkind of American letters’ own style has matured and his work has taken on a depth and complexity, and the richness of a fine vintage.

The Publishers

$6.00

CONSTRUCTING FICTION

James C.L. Brown

Constructing Fiction is a gift to the young or would-be writers of short stories and novels. In plain, no-nonsense prose, Jamie Brown takes the reader for a walk through the world of fiction writing—avoiding the alleys and dead-end streets that so often lure new writers with promises of shortcuts. Here is advice that all writers—those young in the work, and old hands—can actually use.

H. A. Maxson

Constructing Fiction is a must for green writers looking to cut their teeth with short fiction, especially for those who over-think their prose, their process. From notes on character names to telling the author to trust the subconscious and “to get out of the way,” Brown, like Frank O’Hara, dares the writer to go “on your nerve.”

Scott Whitaker (NBCC)

$12.00

THE YEAR OF THE DOG THROWERS

Sid Gold

Sid Gold is a teacher of writing, and a poet as well. That Sid Gold should come to poetry is a remarkably apt occurrence, for few people are quite so excited by words and their meanings as is the Harlem-born, Bronx and Manhattan-raised Gold. Words, words, words, words. Sid talks, and there is a danger in talking for most poets – the danger that they will have given as deep a consideration for the verbal as they do to their written language. In this, Gold is a sort of amphibian, able to breathe in two mediums…But where he may be, on the one hand, conversationally-speaking, broad-ranging and effusive, to say nothing of excitable and plangent, his poetry is finely-tuned, striking exactly the chord he seeks to strike with a minimum of effort. It is as if all of the words that bubble out of him are part of the creative fermentation process, so much excess verbiage, and somehow, what is left (on the page) is high-octane language. Merrill Leffler (Dryad Press) calls him “an urban storyteller whose poems….ride the back of a rhythmic jazz-like line. What may seem conversational is deceptively lyrical, nearly every poem a deliberate — and deliberative — riff in an assured, distinctive voice…”

$8.95

ICE-SOLSTICE

Kelley Jean White

Kelley Jean White’s poetry crackles with electricity. There is science here, math, the bones of the dead, Bach, and the music of despair which is a radio filling a boxcar. White’s poems are tense, strong, full of big, jaunty, precise language that evoke the range of human loss, spiritual, emotional, sexual. Whether she writes about the loss of childhood memories or our mundane world of gasoline prices and nap-weary adults, White brings energy, immediacy and power.